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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
It Really Looks Like the U.S. Is Headed for War With Iran
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. By the time you read this, the United States might be at war with Iran. If not, check back in a few hours or a couple of days, as President Donald Trump is giving every indication that he'll join the fighting soon. True, Trump has gone back and forth on the issue of escalation vs. diplomacy in this war and in others, but his words and actions in the last 24 hours suggest that he's opted for escalation. As recently as Monday, he was still holding out the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. On Tuesday, he gave Iran a very different demand—'unconditional surrender.' That was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's goal against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II: It meant the enemy's total defeat, abject disarmament, and what we now call 'regime change.' Trump also posted on social media: 'We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.' We? He'd said on Monday that he might get involved in the war but hadn't done so yet. It seems that now he is involved, at least in his mind—and possibly in his orders—if not quite yet on or over the battlefield. What has changed in 24 hours is that Israel seems to be on the upswing, pounding target after target, while Iran's efforts at striking back are less than stunning and its prospects for regime survival, much less victory, are dimming. Trump likes winners and wants to join their team. Or, as Charlie Stevenson, who teaches American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies put it in his Policy Matters Substack on Tuesday, 'I think he has FOMO [fear of missing out] and wants to be able to brag that he ended the Iran nuclear threat.' Will he end the threat? Iran has two main uranium enrichment sites, Natanz and Fordo. Both are buried underground. Natanz is a bit more accessible; an Israeli barrage of bombs, on the first day of the war, reportedly did damage to the plant. However, Fordo is buried inside a mountain, almost 300 feet beneath the surface. The only 'bunker-busting' bomb that could destroy the site is the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which only the U.S. has; and the only plane heavy enough to carry the MOP across any distance is the B-2 bomber, which only the U.S. has. (Yes, the mountain could also be demolished by a nuclear weapon, which the U.S. and Israel possess; but I doubt even Trump or Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would go that far.) What about regime change? Early on in the war, Netanyahu reportedly told Trump he wanted to kill Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Trump vetoed the idea. Could he now be reconsidering? In World War II, 'unconditional surrender' meant, among other things, killing or at least removing Hitler and Hirohito. Trump said on Tuesday that he knows where 'the so-called Supreme Leader' is hiding, adding that he didn't want him killed—'for now.' Regime change does seem to be on the agenda, given the types of targets Israel is hitting—not just nuclear infrastructure, but Iranian media, economic infrastructure, and top commanders. (Some call this expansion of targets 'mission creep,' but actually it seems this has been Netanyahu's mission since the campaign got underway.) But then what? Who succeeds the ayatollah? If some Western-leaning, secular opposition figures are waiting in the wings, they haven't been identified. It's another question whether some Western intelligence agency is funding such figures, but it's hard to imagine them rising to the fore and commanding the loyalty or even the interest of Iran's masses without having carved out a public image well ahead of time. It's also worth distinguishing regime change mounted by a native Iranian movement from regime change launched by a foreign power, especially powers like Israel and the United States, which a fair number of Iranians still regard as the devil. The current regime is deeply unpopular among many Iranians, especially young people in the cities, many of whom are pro-Western or at least desire to join the Western world. But even among those people, there is distrust of foreign meddlers, intensified by the 'Mossadegh complex'—memories of Mohammad Mossadegh, a popular Iranian prime minister, overthrown in 1953 by the CIA and British oil companies, which then installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (aka 'the Shah of Iran'), who ruled as a tyrant until the Islamist revolution in 1979. Does Israel or the United States have a plan for a post-ayatollah Iran? Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps lost its commander, but the corps itself survives, and it controls much of the country's economy and social structure. Would they sign the 'unconditional surrender' papers? If so, to whom would they surrender? Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq, with a population of 92 million. Does Trump or Netanyahu imagine that the Iranian people will greet the foreign victors—especially American and Israeli victors—as their liberators? Some might, but it's worth recalling that Iraqis didn't roll over, despite the widespread hatred of Saddam Hussein. Iranians aren't likely to do so either. More likely, the aftermath of a coup, assassination, military decimation, or whatever method brings down the Iranian regime is likely to resemble post-Saddam Iraq—chaos, instability, and civil war, possibly infecting the entire region. 'Israel is good at winning battles but not at winning wars,' Stevenson, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor, observed in his Substack piece. The same has often been true of the United States. Winning battles is a function of military might. Winning wars—even absolute wars ended through unconditional surrender—requires political, strategic, and diplomatic acumen. The Allies didn't leave Germany and Japan to stew in their squalor; they had a plan not just for defeating the old regimes but helping to build new ones. Does Trump, Netanyahu, or anybody else have a plan for Iran? What, to them, does winning the war mean?
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Judges Can Use a Roberts-Invented Judicial Tool to Curb Trump
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On top of his legally dubious commandeering of the California National Guard and the Pentagon's deployment of Marines to (it claims) protect federal assets, President Donald Trump appears to be perilously close to invoking a law from the early 19th century, the Insurrection Act, as a basis for deploying regular troops to police American cities. While shocking, it is unfortunately not surprising: Trump regrets not having invoked the act to respond to protests in 2020, having been talked down by the 'adults' in his administration. With the adults long since dismissed and Congress missing in action, resistance to this Trump power grab could come from an unlikely source: federal judges. Packing the judiciary was the crowning achievement of the president's first term, which resulted in a stable of young, Trump-appointed conservative judges trained by their Federalist Society boosters. Some of these same appointees might be standing in the way of Trump's most dangerous overreaches, which to survive judicial review would require judges to exhibit broad deference to the executive branch. Trump appears frustrated by this irony on many fronts. At the end of May, a long-simmering rupture finally spilled into the open when the president took to Truth Social to lambast 'sleazebag' Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, perhaps the most influential political organization so far this century. The trigger? A pair of court decisions, one signed by a Trump appointee, declaring the White House's tariff regime unlawful. (One of the district courts temporarily stayed its own order, and an appeals court later stayed the other decision from taking effect while the administration appeals.) At first blush, the outburst might seem confounding. After all, during the Trump administration's first term, the White House and Leo worked hand in glove to stock the federal courts, above all the Supreme Court, with appointees drawn from the ranks of the Federalist Society and its allies. The results were the most consequential achievement of Trump's first presidency, leading most notably to the overturning of Roe. However, today's MAGA movement, perhaps more than in its first iteration, has a set of ideological commitments of its own—namely, a muscular, personalist, and near-monarchical vision of executive authority (especially within certain issue areas like trade and immigration). And these priors sit uneasily alongside the Federalist Society's decadeslong bid to rein in the regulatory state that it believes bedevils corporate interests. In fact, these competing priorities have been set on a collision course for some time: The MAGA 2.0 movement's policy ambitions require precisely the type of bold, transformative executive power that the anti-administrative conservative legal apparatus has spent the past several decades attempting to frustrate. This tension also demonstrates precisely why the administration's opponents should continue to invoke Roberts court precedents, including those they might philosophically disagree with, to oppose the administration's harmful policy agenda: Such arguments could be successful, even in conservative courts. And if progressive litigants lose with these claims, it is not all bad news. As we have argued elsewhere, litigants using anti-administrative doctrines against Trump policies could lead Trump-aligned judges to curb those doctrines, which might make future progressive governance easier. Nowhere is the overall MAGA–vs.–Federalist Society dynamic clearer than in the chaos over Trump's tariff policy. In April, industry and states launched a wave of litigation challenging the legality of Trump's steep and widely applied 'liberation day' tariffs. The litigants claimed that the tariffs would raise prices, disrupt their supply chains, and otherwise increase the costs of doing business. One tool that the plaintiffs in all three lawsuits wielded is the major questions doctrine, a rule that was formally established in a landmark 2022 decision issued by the conservative Supreme Court supermajority that Trump built during his first term. After bubbling under the surface since the early 2000s, the major questions doctrine emerged in West Virginia v. EPA to herald a new, less deferential regime in review of agency policymaking. Under the doctrine, if an agency action is 'major'—if it is novel, transformative, and economically and politically significant—then it can survive only if Congress quite specifically directed the action. During the Biden administration, the high court repeatedly invoked the doctrine to cut down a host of progressive regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, the COVID-19 eviction moratorium, and student-debt cancellation. Lower courts got in on the action too, using the major questions doctrine to stymie several Biden efforts. And the doctrine has metastasized beyond the regulatory context, with courts applying it to individual enforcement actions, agency guidance documents, and presidential actions. Much to the chagrin of progressive lawyers, who hoped to forestall such a development, the doctrine may have all but become, in the words of Judge Jed Rakoff, 'at bottom, a principle of statutory construction,' apparently applicable wherever statutes are interpreted. Yet, now that he has returned to the White House, Trump has to contend with anti-administrative thinking, like the major questions doctrine, fashioned by the very Supreme Court supermajority he constructed, including in the context of tariffs. In their complaints, states and businesses argued that the political significance of the 'highly novel tariffs' are 'staggering by any measure,' are 'likely much larger' than those of prior 'executive actions previously found by the Supreme Court to be 'major questions,' ' and represent an 'unheralded' and 'transformative expansion' of presidential authority. The litigants then explained that nowhere in the text of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, under which Trump issued his tariffs, does the statute offer the 'clear congressional authorization' required by the major questions doctrine. So far, at least two courts agree. A unanimous three-judge panel, including a Trump appointee, discussed plaintiffs' major questions doctrine claims in detail and ultimately held that, 'regardless of whether the court views the President's actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.' Similarly, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the D.C. District Court cited a recent SCOTUS major questions doctrine case to explain that 'if Congress had intended to delegate to the President the power of taxing ordinary commerce from any country at any rate for virtually any reason, it would have had to say so.' Tariffs are not the only MAGA priority that might suffer at the hands of doctrines that conservative jurists have pioneered in recent years. For example, an ACLU lawyer and Judge James Boasberg agreed in a hearing that the president's reliance on a 1789 wartime law to summarily deport suspected gang members was far removed from the legislation's historical use, suggesting that principles of the major questions doctrine might apply. These examples help illustrate one reason why progressive litigants, who might philosophically oppose frameworks like the major questions doctrine, should nonetheless invoke them to challenge harmful Trump 2.0 agenda items: They might win. That is not to say that, perhaps especially at SCOTUS, we should always expect doctrinal rigor to supersede the kinds of political considerations that often undergird high-profile decisions. But the federal judiciary does not operate in a fluid, top-down fashion. Once issued, Supreme Court precedents take on a life of their own in the district and circuit courts, which enjoy ample latitude to find the play in their joints. Moreover, and as we have suggested elsewhere, a proliferation of major questions doctrine claims against a Republican president—even if they are ultimately unsuccessful—could have a beneficial side effect. One of the key challenges that the doctrine poses to regulatory governance is its malleability, thanks to the high court's poor articulation of the philosophy's scope and application. Bringing major questions doctrine cases against Trump policies in front of Trump-aligned judges could cause those judges to discipline the unwieldy and sprawling doctrine, a medium-to-good outcome that could prove useful for future attempts at progressive governance. Beyond the effect on any particular lawsuits, invoking these doctrines against Donald Trump's signature policies can also help expand the fault line that has emerged between the anti-administrative conservative legal apparatus and the MAGA 2.0 movement, the policy ambitions of which require precisely the type of bold, transformative executive power that the former was constructed to impede. Driving a further wedge between these onetime allies can only redound to the collective benefit of the administration's opponents.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Sun Belt Cities Are Becoming More Like Boston and San Francisco
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For the past 50 years, Forsyth County, Georgia, has been one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Today, the population of this Atlanta exurb, 45 miles northwest of the city, is 280,000—more than 10 times as many people as lived there just 40 years ago. It's emblematic of the Sun Belt boom that has shifted the nation's population geography south, into a string of fast-growing cities from Orlando to Phoenix. Forsyth County may be emblematic of the Sun Belt in another way: It has soured on growth. In the last election, one commissioner ran as 'big corporate developers' worst nightmare'; another trumpeted 'zero apartments approved.' This spring, county commissioners voted to establish a 180-day moratorium to freeze rezoning for residential development. 'Our roads are gridlocked, and our schools are full,' said a third commissioner, Mendy Moore. Similar growing pains are playing out in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as residents grow irate over the loss of farmland, overworked sewer systems, crowded schools, and traffic. They are responding with impact fees, traffic studies, minimum lot sizes, and moratoriums, among other urban-planning tactics to slow down subdivision builders. 'Anti-Growth Fervor Grips US South,' Bloomberg wrote last year. The belt isn't buckling anymore. In a new working paper, economists Edward Glaeser and Joe Gyourko put some data behind the anecdata. They show that the rate of new home construction is collapsing in big metro areas like Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Raleigh that have long been synonymous with sprawl and cheap housing—especially on the urban frontier. They are building housing at a pace much closer to those of Rust Belt cities like Detroit and coastal cities like Los Angeles these days. 'What we show is there is a sharp decline in the intensity of building in high-price, low-density housing tracts. What's that? That's the best suburbs,' Gyourko, a professor at Penn's Wharton School, told me. As sprawl dries up, prices are soaring: The paper notes that home prices in Miami, Tampa, and Phoenix have grown faster than those in metro New York City since 2000. Increasingly, housing affordability is a national problem, inspiring policy action in once cheap cities like Dallas and states like Montana. But problem solvers in those places may be up against a vicious cycle, in which rising prices attract well-heeled buyers who support policies that stop development—and cause prices to rise further. 'Sun Belt residents are starting to behave and stop development the way Bostonians did in the '80s and '90s,' Gyourko hypothesized. 'It's similar behavior but just starting much later. They're not [exactly like] coastal cities yet, but if this keeps going for another 20 years they will be, and housing will be very expensive.' From the 1970s to the 2000s, Sun Belt cities built on a massive scale—hundreds of thousands of new homes each decade. The sweet spot for those new homes, Glaeser and Gyourko show, was in 'high price, low density' tracts—places that were in high demand, relative to the metropolitan average, and very suburban in character. In the 1970s, for example, Atlanta built 88 percent of its new homes in such areas—areas like Forsyth County. Miami built 65 percent of homes in those parts of the region in the 1980s. Dallas and Phoenix peaked in the 1990s. Since then, the share of new homes getting built in those areas has fallen in all of those cities and others—evidence, the authors suggest, of a rising tide of not-in-my-backyard sentiment. And that's a smaller share of a much smaller pie: Overall, the housing stock in these cities is growing by less than 1 percent a year, a fraction of the pace of decades past. Of course there are other possibilities. Nationally, construction has not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. The accompanying mortgage finance crackdown boxed lower-income buyers out of the market. There may be geographical and temporal limits to desire in sprawl, points so far from the metropolitan center of gravity that nobody wants to live there. And then there is the shift toward demand for more housing in closer-in, denser neighborhoods, which command high per-square-foot prices and have long been starved for development. But the data suggest that the sprawl decline began before the financial crisis. And while a comb of tall apartment buildings on Miami's Biscayne Bay waterfront in Brickell might reflect increased demand for urban living, there may be a push factor there—development is going where development can go. In some quarters, this will be taken as good news. In addition to its environmental costs, sprawl's reputation for affordability is undermined by the enormous transportation expenses that come along with living miles from schools, shops, and jobs. If you include the obligation that every adult in the household own, fuel, maintain, and insure a car, supposedly affordable cities like Houston can wind up being more expensive than cities like New York, by some measures. Still, what construction has shifted to higher-density areas hasn't been enough to offset sprawl's decline, and rising home prices reflect that. In April, Conor Dougherty wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine questioning the conventional wisdom of anti-sprawl, arguing that exurban development has been a vital escape valve for the nation's failure to build enough infill housing. His focus was on Princeton, Texas, 43 miles from Dallas, where the population has more than doubled since the pandemic, to 37,000 last year. In May, the Census Bureau dubbed Princeton the fastest-growing city in the country. But it is also a poster child for the limits of sprawl. Last year, Princeton passed a moratorium on new residential development. The city staff said: 'The city's water, wastewater and roadway infrastructure is operating at, near, or beyond capacity.' Princeton, Texas, is full. Keep moving.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This Platform Was Supposed to Replace Twitter. It's Not Going So Well.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For a different perspective on what's happening with Bluesky, check out our colleague Luke Winkie's piece here. Bluesky's big breakthrough as an alternative to the Elon Muskified Twitter was seven months ago. It hasn't lasted. Or, at least, its enormous growth right after Donald Trump's reelection has not kept up. The site got a surge of new sign-ups almost immediately after the election and, shortly after the inauguration, crossed 30 million accounts. But user growth has slowed, with the site now at about 36.5 million accounts, and it appears that more and more of those accounts are becoming ghosts as users abandon the platform. Unique posters and unique likers of posts have been in steady downward descent for months. Though Bluesky has more users now than after the election, it is a smaller, less active digital community. Bigger than 2023, when it was accessible only via invitation code, but not quite big. Both of us, Alex and Nitish, have made Bluesky our primary microblogging app. Choosing it was a big commitment for two people whose brains are infected with an insatiable appetite to post and read posts. For us, Bluesky has supplanted X. But most people have not made that move, and because they haven't, they may not be familiar with Bluesky's favorite topic: Bluesky. For weeks, one of the site's most popular conversation topics has been why more people aren't using it. Theories abound, and we think that the most popular one—that Bluesky's lack of traction has to do with a tilt toward liberal users—misses the point. There's not one exact answer, but after several hundred hours each (yikes!) scrolling and posting on the platform, we have a few ideas about what's happening to the most promising X competitor. We're now prepared to share this conversation with you so that you, too, can enter the arena. Alex Kirshner: Nitish! You have been wasting your time primarily on Bluesky, rather than X, for half a year now. How would you say your digital life has changed? Nitish Pahwa: Alex! It's certainly been interesting. I'm a longtime Bluesky adopter, going back to the referral-code days, but after I fully quit X postelection, I made it my microblog of choice, especially as more ex-Xers joined. That was a phenomenal surge, and not only did it help to populate the site (my God, those early days were desolate), but it brought so many users with interests beyond niche tech and politics stuff—pop culture, basketball, comedy, etc. We even got a few random but fun celebrities who are still posting, like Flavor Flav and Mina Kimes and even the Portland Trail Blazers. That burst of excitement has settled down a bit, and I'm both nervous and uncertain about what comes next. I've found a lot of pure joy on the platform, connected with new folks, and curated lists for myself to make the most of the experience. But Bluesky does feel like the concentration of old #Resistance Twitter, conjoined with a dash of Facebook refugees. That is exactly the cocktail we're talking about, accounting for a solid majority of everyday users. It can certainly be exhausting; I know people who've dropped out after finding that none of their nonpolitics articles or posts ever really take off (much as I've tried to help out). And it hasn't yet become the Live experience that was so essential to old Twitter. Things did get poppin' during the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight, the GNX drop, and the Super Bowl, especially the halftime show. But it's few and far between, and it's not yet been enough to distract from the more grating aspects of the feed. Do you find yourself missing X, then? I don't, though I have a burner there for moments like the Elon–Trump scrape. (As an aside: It's also funny to me how people still pretend that X is a bustling town square. We all knew that Twitter was shedding users long before Elon took over! And X is still losing tweeters who aren't on alternative networks. But anyway.) I've overall appreciated Bluesky and still think there's potential here, but I also understand why people have dropped off, and that doesn't feel great. But I'm curious about your thoughts. Bluesky has the thing I want most: a nice community of a few thousand people ('my mutuals') who riff about sports and TV and seem to want to live in a better world. Plus, it doesn't have the thing I want least: blue-check-marked accounts replying to links to my Slate stories with: 'Hmm, Kirshner. Interesting last name. Jew?' These things should be the foundation of a delightful social media experience. But I don't think they have been, and I've been trying to unpack why I often feel madder after scrolling than I ever did on Twitter. Please psychoanalyze me. I don't think you're alone there! Unfortunately, the jokes are far outweighed by the solemnity. My friend Ashwin Rodrigues wrote a sharp piece about this headlined 'Bluesky Can't Take a Joke'—the reaction to which, naturally, all but proved his point. It's not just an honest-to-goodness New York Times reporter telling Chris Hayes that he's spreading misinfo for re-skeeting(?) a clearly mocked-up NYT screenshot; it's people who can't even comprehend why Bluesky should also be a place where people can enjoy themselves, even though American democracy is crumbling, etc. Some Bluesky users don't seem to want that kind of bifurcation. There are periodic viral posts to the effect of 'How are you posting about Andor while American-made bombs fall on Gaza?' Or last week's viral moments of various Bluesky users telling people that the Trump–Musk meltdown was 'a distraction' or that it was misogynistic to joke that 'the girls are fighting.' And those are outlier takes that most users find ridiculous, but I suspect they've contributed to a collective bad rep. It's always this sort of post that I see working its way onto X or Instagram in the context of making fun of Bluesky. Ken White had a good observation: that critics 'have an exaggerated expectation of Twitter alternatives, imposing norms of decorum, civility, productivity, etc. that they absolutely do not impose on Twitter.' I do appreciate so many of the people on Bluesky, who help me feel so much less insane these days when it comes to reckoning with Democratic cowardice, A.I. hucksters, and bullshit punditry. But, even though it's less algorithm-centric than so many other platforms, it falls into the rage-bait trap that comes for all social media. The most engaged users are also the ones likeliest to boost and reshare the same bad news you heard just hours ago, to ask why you're not weighing in on every little injustice that lands hour after hour, and to repost up a storm of the most depressing shit you've ever seen—and they're also the least likely to converse with you when you just wanna talk about Shoreline Mafia's return. Social media incentives, man. Elon Musk started literally paying people to post on X, proportional to how often their posts got seen. Bluesky does nothing like that, but because it's a platform full of people who are either sad, angry, or desperate about the state of the world, the kinds of posts that proliferate around that platform are mostly not fun posts. There's no Bluesky virality for quote-posting a pic of Timothée Chalamet and the Jenners at a Knicks game. And I don't know if a million screenshots of executive orders have made me a better citizen. This weekend was a perfect exhibit of all the crisscrossing tensions we've been identifying here. On one hand, you had a decent amount of folks posting about significant cultural events, in sports (the French Open, the NBA Finals) and even theater (the Good Night, and Good Luck livestream, the Tony Awards). But that all ran headlong into the political horrors we saw erupt at the same time, like the militant federal crackdown on the pro-immigrant protesters in L.A., and Israel's interception of the Madleen aid flotilla. Frankly, I'm not sure any social media—much less an underresourced startup whose leaders prioritize steady operation over far-flung growth—is equipped to handle these clashes of reality right now. I wonder how many of us are subliminally expecting that a social media site can do that, if for no other reason than social media is where people spend time and consume news. I don't think that Bluesky can, or should, be the space for the public to actually organize and act against democratic crisis. But when it comes to the basic function—understanding what's all happening in the world right now—I'd much rather have Bluesky over the alternatives. Christopher Mims, from the Wall Street Journal, made the point over the weekend that 'on X it's 'LA is burning; deport them all.' ' Smug X-ers love to say Bluesky is a bubble that fences off libs from reality, but frankly, we're now seeing all their skewed misrepresentations of what's happening in L.A. translating into mainstream coverage! And, look, I can scroll past stupidity on Bluesky , but on X it's very likely I'm just going to see Substackers raging nonstop over an account full of cherry-picked Bluesky screenshots. Like, the critics of Bluesky would have much stronger points if they … knew what the platform is actually like, both its strengths and weaknesses? My eyes roll into the back of my head when people, like this Washington Post columnist, assess that Bluesky's problem is that it's a liberal bubble that lacks a diversity of views. People fight on Bluesky all the time. They fight with each other over politics. They pick fights with media organizations, including us at Slate. They pick fights with Bluesky's moderation team, in an old-school Twitter way. The platform has a significant left-of-center bent, and I wouldn't claim that it's never hive-minded into a wrong conclusion. But, God, have you ever seen Twitter hive-mind something? It turns out that when groups of people think, sometimes they will groupthink. And unlike X, Bluesky isn't algorithmically tilting the political discourse in one direction. Bluesky does have big structural problems related to politics. The same genre of events that drove people to the platform in the first place (eroding norms, human suffering in all its forms, the chance to litigate Kamala Harris' campaign strategy) is all that many people want to talk about. But my Bluesky experience isn't lacking because I'm surrounded by liberals and leftists. It's lacking because there are roughly 14 people there with whom I can bitch about the Pittsburgh Pirates, compared to hundreds on X. (Though it feels, for some reason, as if Bluesky really does adore tennis?) The platform needs more people posting about more things. I think what we should care about is that a substantive platform even exists that encourages dialogue over A.I. slop, that encourages people to share their original work, that doesn't drown out their conversation with unmoderated and arbitrary racism. After Elon's takeover, X lost all value to me as a journalistic resource—for finding sources and reliable information and for getting my pieces out there. I'm not the only one whose engagement there fell off quite starkly as Musk tweaked the algorithm to downplay tweets with links and boost all the $8 blue-check buyers and their slop instead. Outlets as varied as Wired and McSweeney's have explicitly credited Bluesky with reviving their engagement and audience sources in the post-Twitter, post-Facebook age. I think that should be what the platform leans in to—offering a way for creators to find healthier exposure and routes to audience building again, instead of selling their soul for a video on X that'll get downranked as soon as you start casting doubt on the reality of 'white genocide.' I mean, let's be frank: The audience for microblogging and text-based content is smaller than it used to be. But what Bluesky's very existence has proved is that there is still firm demand for this style of media and that it holds for so many people with all kinds of interests—Rap Twitter, NBA Twitter, Lit Twitter, etc. Honestly, I think the fact that its critics feel the need to shit on it is just proof positive! But, dear God, we need more fun and more shitposters. Let this be my call to all you jokesters out there: Please join us. Let's talk about Not News and crack esoteric riffs. I'll boost you every single time, I promise. Part of the challenge here is that Twitter, at its best, was like a giant state university. It could be all things to all comers, which was a rare trick, and it was as big or as small as you wanted it to be. It had every student club imaginable. Bluesky is more of a small liberal arts college, and look: Oberlin has its advantages over Ohio State. I bet the dorms are nicer, and not everyone needs to go to a school with a zillion people, many of whom are deranged. (Shoutout to my Ohio State football pals.) But I do think that when some kind of annoying kid from Greek life shows up on the Bluesky quad one day, users there should go out of their way to tell him to bring his friends. Speaking as a state university grad: absolutely.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Two Curious Things About Trump's Remarks on His Military Parade
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The big military parade that will be taking place along the National Mall in Washington this Saturday is shaping up to be not so much a celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th birthday but rather a high-octane ego boost and joyride for President Donald Trump. It has been widely noted that the event happens to fall not only on the Army's birthday but on Trump's as well. The convergence is no mere coincidence. After all, this year will also mark the 250th birthday of the Navy and the Marine Corps, on Oct. 13 and Nov. 10, respectively. But the president has not announced plans to join—much less preside over—their festive, if less grandiose, celebrations. Trump says the Army parade will display—and demonstrate that America possesses—'the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest Army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we're going to celebrate it.' Apart from the fact that submarines are the Navy's pride, not the Army's, and can't be hauled out for any sort of public display, two peculiarities stand out in Trump's remarks. First, all of the weapons that will be rolling down, or flying above, Constitution Avenue—26 Abrams tanks, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 27 Stryker vehicles, and several dozen personnel carriers, as well as more than 50 helicopters—were built long ago. In fact, the Army hasn't built any new tanks or fighting vehicles in this century. In other words, the boasts—which aren't incorrect (the Abrams and the Bradley do rank among the world's greatest armored vehicles)—don't align with Trump's claims, in other forums, that his predecessors ravaged the military and left the country defenseless. (At a House hearing on Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made similar claims and asserted that he and Trump had vastly improved our preparedness—even though they haven't yet submitted a detailed defense budget, much less enacted it, or developed and built any of its proposed weapon systems.) More striking is what Trump omitted from his list of enthusiasms: the men and women who serve in the armed forces. Trump clearly doesn't care much about any of the people who train, fight, or die for our country. It's worth recalling the claim, made by his former chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, that Trump once derided fallen soldiers as 'losers' and 'suckers.' Trump denies he ever said that. But if you believe the president over the general, consider that, earlier this year, Trump changed the names of Memorial Day and Veterans Day to 'Victory in World War II Day' and 'Victory in World War I Day.' The change is significant—and appalling. It means that the vast majority of American veterans have no day of their own to commemorate. (About 66,000 World War II vets are still alive, but that amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation's 15.8 million living veterans from all wars.) Nor do the families of those who died in more recent wars—around 36,000 in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam, 4,500 in Iraq, and 2,200 in Afghanistan, among others. Trump has no interest in memorializing service or sacrifice for their own sake. (Remember his dis of John McCain, who was tortured in North Vietnamese jails for five years after getting shot down: 'He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured.') Winning is all that matters in Trump's book—and our most solemn national holidays have been altered to reflect his mindset. Even winning is an abstract concept, floating on bombast. Trump wanted to throw a massive military parade in his first term after French President Emmanuel Macron hosted him at the cavalcade in Paris celebrating Bastille Day. French troops marched down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées alongside tanks and armored vehicles as fighter jets swooshed over the Arc de Triomphe. Trump was elated. Back home, he told everyone he could that he needed to stage his own version—and to 'top it.' His defense secretary at the time, retired Gen. James Mattis, hated the idea, telling his aides that he'd 'rather swallow acid.' Mattis responded by saying the parade would cost $90 million—a deliberate exaggeration, according to a Pentagon source of mine at the time. The ploy worked; even Trump backed off, seeing the price tag as too high. The parade this Saturday is said to cost $45 million, not counting the expense of disrupting much of the city for four days and repairing the damage done by tank treads. (Each Abrams tank weighs 70 tons, almost twice the avenue's maximum capacity.) This seems like a lot of money, given the latest round of Department of Government Efficiency budget cuts. But it's a lot less than the $134 million that the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines in California is estimated to cost. And that show of force is no less performative or unnecessary than the parade in the nation's capital. Trump may hope that the parade will provide another occasion for force as well as show. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that 'those people that want to protest' at the parade 'are going to be met with very big force.' Those protesters, he added, without identifying who they might be or what they might be protesting, 'hate our country,' so, he repeated, 'they will be met with very heavy force.' Notice: He wasn't warning of a forceful response to violent protesters—just to 'people that want to protest,' who, he claimed, by definition, 'hate our country.' He doesn't seem to be aware—or, if he is, he doesn't care—that citizens' protest is an American tradition every bit as hallowed as the Army. Nor should his remark be dismissed as a lighthearted joke. In his first term, he suggested that National Guard members should be ordered to shoot protesters in the leg. His defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, calmly said he couldn't do that. Trump's current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth—who speaks excitedly about 'the warrior ethos,' campaigned for the pardoning of war criminals, and expresses utmost loyalty to Trump—might savor the opportunity. This is his birthday bash, goddammit, and he's not going to let some pacifists or immigrant-loving protesters upset the party.
